Parishioners pray Sunday during a Spanish-language mass at the Santa Rosa Church in San Fernando.
Brenda Gazzar — Staff

SAN FERNANDO >> When Janelly Jimenez was struggling with her grades in her first year of college, she decided to return to the Catholic Church where she was baptized and had her confirmation.

The Cal State Northridge freshman convinced her 12-year-old sister, Arlene, to accompany her a few months ago and the sisters now join their immigrant parents every Sunday for a Spanish-language mass at Santa Rosa Catholic Church in San Fernando.

“I wanted to go to church just to feel a little more calm, knowing God is there for me,” Jimenez, 19, of Lake View Terrace said after Sunday’s 8 a.m. mass. “I feel way more calm now in school. After church, I go (pray) to the Virgin Mary and say ‘please help me out’ and I feel like she is.”

Jimenez, who now looks forward to church every week, may be the exception among her peers. A new study warns that the Roman Catholic Church in America is at risk of alienating and losing greater numbers of Hispanics if it doesn’t cater more to this diverse ethnic group and especially to its youth.

The burgeoning Hispanic Catholic community — which makes up 40 percent of all Catholics in the country — is overwhelming the Catholic Church and challenging parishes in education, language, geography and ministry, according to the “National Study of Catholic Parishes with Hispanic Ministry.”

“The church is doing its best to respond to the Latino presence, however, most of the efforts that the church is using to work with Latinos are geared toward immigrants,” said Boston College School of Theology and Ministry Assistant Professor Hosffman Ospino, who led the study that was released last week. “The vast majority of Latinos who are Catholics in the U.S. are U.S.-born and young... We discovered that there’s very little these communities are doing to reach out to Hispanic youth on the one hand, and secondly, to U.S. youth who are born in the U.S.”

For example, only 3 percent of Hispanic children attend Catholic schools, Ospino said.

Around the country, only one in four parishes offer some form of organized ministry to Hispanics and many are led predominantly by non-Hispanic white priests — though some do speak fluent Spanish — and pastoral leaders nearing retirement age, Ospino said. Programs need to be in place to prepare Hispanic priests and church leaders for Hispanic ministry in the coming years.

Only 40 percent of parishes with Hispanic ministry have youth groups specifically oriented to Hispanic youths and these groups usually have only between 30 and 40 young people. In addition, only 4 percent of these parishes have developed outreach programs for Hispanic youths involved in gangs. Five percent have some form of ministry to imprisoned Hispanic youth, with the largest number (10 percent) of these parishes in the West, according to the study.

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“We need to invest now in Hispanic youth so we’ll have a strong Hispanic church in the next couple of decades,” Ospino said, noting that 55 percent of all Catholics under 30 are Hispanic today. “We’re reaching only a tiny fraction of the Hispanic population that is young.”

This was the first time a comprehensive national study focused solely on Catholic parishes with Hispanic ministry.

Not only has the Church struggled to keep pace with the community’s high rate of growth, many young Hispanic Catholics are assimilating into the culture around them.

Nearly one in four Latinos in the country are now former Catholics, according to a new Pew Research Center report. While most Hispanics in the country continue to belong to the Catholic Church, the Catholic share of the Hispanic population is declining, while an increasing number of Hispanics are Protestant or unaffiliated with any religion.

Reaching out, serving and involving Hispanics in ministries continues to be “a top priority” for the Catholic Church, said Norma Montenegro Flynn, a spokeswoman for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.

“The Hispanic community has grown very fast, particularly in the last decade, and our parishes and dioceses work actively to serve and keep up with the pastoral needs,” she said in a statement.

Hispanic lay leadership has never been higher. Right now, 43 percent of the more than 22,500 lay people in church leadership formation programs are Hispanic, she said. About 15 percent of active permanent deacons are Hispanic. They also have initiatives to increase the number of Hispanic students in Catholic schools and to increase the number of religious vocations among Hispanics, Flynn said.

Ospino also found a disparity in resources among the nation’s parishes. Some are truly vibrant, while others — many of which offer Hispanic ministry — are struggling to avoid shuttering their doors.

“Most of the growth of the church is in the West and South (but) that’s where there are fewer resources, fewer personnel and fewer structures,” he said.